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Optimization is fundamental in many areas of science, from computer science and information theory to engineering and statistical physics, as well as to biology or social sciences. It typically involves a large number of variables and a cost function depending on these variables. Optimization problems in the NP-complete class are particularly difficult, it is believed that the number of operations required to minimize the cost function is in the most difficult cases exponential in the system size. However, even in an NP-complete problem the practically arising instances might, in fact, be easy to solve. The principal question we address in this thesis is: How to recognize if an NP-complete constraint satisfaction problem is typically hard and what are the main reasons for this? We adopt approaches from the statistical physics of disordered systems, in particular the cavity method developed originally to describe glassy systems. We describe new properties of the space of solutions in two of the most studied constraint satisfaction problems - random satisfiability and random graph coloring. We suggest a relation between the existence of the so-called frozen variables and the algorithmic hardness of a problem. Based on these insights, we introduce a new class of problems which we named locked constraint satisfaction, where the statistical description is easily solvable, but from the algorithmic point of view they are even more challenging than the canonical satisfiability.
We introduce and study the random locked constraint satisfaction problems. When increasing the density of constraints, they display a broad clustered phase in which the space of solutions is divided into many isolated points. While the phase diagram
The set of solutions of random constraint satisfaction problems (zero energy groundstates of mean-field diluted spin glasses) undergoes several structural phase transitions as the amount of constraints is increased. This set first breaks down into a
Identifying the relevant coarse-grained degrees of freedom in a complex physical system is a key stage in developing powerful effective theories in and out of equilibrium. The celebrated renormalization group provides a framework for this task, but i
In this letter we propose the use of physics techniques for entropy determination on constrained parameter optimization problems. The main feature of such techniques, the construction of an unbiased walk on energy space, suggests their use on the que
We propose a statistical mechanics for a general class of stationary and metastable equilibrium states. For this purpose, the Gibbs extremal conditions are slightly modified in order to be applied to a wide class of non-equilibrium states. As usual,